Topic A, Part 4: Teach Your Children Well

A slight (but oh so slight as to stay on track) shift on this topic. Thanks to PF all of my friends are now addicted to RapCat, and there is indeed an indescribable beauty to being able to watch the commercial for "The Clapper" anytime you like. I mention this commercial in particular because:
a. I love the cranky old woman at the end.
b. A friend of mine tried to find this very commercial in the pre-YouTube era whilst on the job and ended up downloading a ton of spyware onto her company computer. Whoops!

But one thing that has stunned me about YouTube is the proliferation of online blogging. I'm certain there is a fancier name for these things, but you get the ideer. Now whether they are honest-to-God 16 year olds or a bunch of actors who merely look like fragile 16 year olds is really beside the point. I saw the video below and was horrified on several levels. Give it a look, I'll wait.

In my day, we wrote all of this sort of thing down in spiral bound notebooks or little journals with butterflies on the cover which were kept under lock and key. Then 2 or 3 or even 10 years later we found it again and shuddered at our innocence or stupidity or even just wept as we remembered how painful and awkward those years were. But we most certainly didn't put it on the internet to be found by our parents and classmates.

It also brings up a good point brought up earlier by Miss Imperial. Anonymity sometimes brings out the worst in people, and for evidence you need to look no farther than message boards and the comments on YouTube. This poor kid is just about as awkward as they come, and the comments under this video telling him to kill himself because he's pathetic and hated made me unbelievably sad. Is this where we are, people? Is this the magic of technology that was promised us? Laughing at Britney's bad skin on HDTV and telling the underdog to kill himself?

That's it, my kids are using a Commodore 64 for their homework and playing Pong.